“And so, 40 man content was how I learned. And it was kinda sucky. In pre-BC raiding, it seemed to me that, in our guild anyway, out of 40 players fielded on a given evening, 25 or so were real damn good, 10 or so were fairly decent, and 5 flat out sucked.” –Big Bear Butt
…wow, dude, only 5? I swear to god we carried more than that, and when BC hit and we shifted down to 10 man content it was a sudden slap in the face. “Holy shit,” we said, “Some of these people really suck!”
And we were clear up to C’thun and poking into Naxx by that point, too. I can’t even promise that Iwas good back then. Certainly at the start, I wasn’t. Then again, playing a paladin back in the day was spamming your one button on your target(s) and saying a quick prayer. Sometimes, you used your other button, and BoP! O snap!
I sort of miss the 4o man days, though. I had 8 other holy paladins to bond with. 8 other people who “get” it, 8 other people to bounce ideas off of, 8 other people to come to with questions. Who the hell was 5+ of any given class these days, never mind of the same spec?
…I don’t miss assembling those raids, though. Oh boy, was that a pain in the ass even just as one of the ones WAITING.
I Like Bubbles 
#1 by Resonate on August 3, 2009 - 12:08 pm
The thing I remember most about raiding Vanilla (as a mage) was making water for everyone. Two bottles at a time. And handing them all out by hand.
Good times, good times.
#2 by Zalgosh on August 3, 2009 - 12:16 pm
When my friend and I were telling his wife stories of wow how it was back in the day (he raided vanilla wow on his mage, i started early BC), and he talked about that. He said all the mages would show up a half an hour or more early, just to get started making water.
The three of us have been levelling together, and its fun when we’re doing quests and he or I make comments like “Wow, I remember when all of these mobs used to be elite.”
#3 by Dorgol on August 3, 2009 - 1:00 pm
My biggest annoyance of Old School raiding was Summons. Every summon required 3 people and a shard – and we didn’t have shard bags! AND there weren’t any summoning stones! Our guild prioritized the Onyxia Hide bag to Warlocks since we had to carry so many shards. I got the first one, then 3 or 4 other locks (most of whom didn’t even stick around long) – and then the week that the bag could only go to our Warlock class-lead… Blizzard announced shard bags and our GM decided to just random the bag to anyone in the raid. And I got that one. :)
Oh, and gearing choices were basically “take what you can get”. Hit cap? I was raiding before there was ANY +Hit gear for spells! There was ONE weapon for casters (Azuresong Mageblade) – and the Paladins wanted it (we lol’d them down).
Were there slackers in 40 man raids? No doubt. I never ran mods (and still don’t, really), so I never noticed any.
Oh! Oh! I remember! 8 debuffs per mob! This at a time when an interepid warlock could add 5 or 6 BY THEMSELVES. Then came the 16 debuffs and everyone was like “wtf we’ll steamroll this place!” (and we did).
#4 by Silk on August 3, 2009 - 6:17 pm
Well we currently raid with between 6 and 9 paladins….
We usually have 3 in our 10 man too. I remember a few Naxx runs where we had 3 paladin tanks and 4 paladin healers.